Pretty deep into this movie, it hit me: This film felt like it had been plotted out by a couple of 8-year-olds. Except, they weren’t weird, loner, clever 8-year-olds. This would be your garden-variety 8-year-old dummy. “Ooh, then we’ll make THIS happen! Pow pow pow. And then a giant monster could show up and be all smash smash smash!”

I didn’t much like Batman v Superman. And why couldn’t the title just have been Batman v Superman? The extraneous post-colon Dawn of Justice seems like it was spit out of a random action-movie title generator.

Once you have the BvS title, it’s really not too hard to slap together the storyline, right? Because Batman and Superman are both good guys. So there must be some zany misunderstanding why they’re angry at each other. And then they’ll fight, and then they’ll make up, because they’re both good guys. Then they’ll figure out who the real villain is. The End. Nice work, 8 year olds.

So a whole lot of the movie is leading up to the big fight. And because it’s a superhero movie, there’s a bunch of that “can we trust this masked vigilante?” stuff that we’ve seen a zillion times over. Yawn. I won’t gripe too much about how gray and humorless this is, because I already did that for the precursor, Man of Steel. (Fool me twice, shame on me.) Once again, gloomy gus Christopher Nolan is the executive producer. The problem is, Zack Snyder isn’t nearly as talented a director as Nolan. Though the fact that Snyder also directed Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Jeff Gillooly might explain the stupid long title here.

When we eventually get to some action, I started noticing that everything was CGI on top of sound stages, so it never really grabbed me (like the visceral thrills in Mad Max: Fury Road did). For me, a superhero story has a better chance of succeeding if it’s grounded in reality. And if it’s not, the movie better be a whole lot of fun. BvS isn’t either.

Henry Cavill is once again OK but nothing special as (spoiler alert!) Clark Kent/Superman. Amy Adams is back as Lois Lane and now we get Laurence Fishburne as Perry White; maybe the filmmakers should watch Spotlight before trying to portray journalism in the next sequel. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg. Oh wait, IMDB says he’s actually supposed to be Lex Luthor. Too whiny/nerdy and therefore annoying. And in one scene he’s stumbling over his words but that is not a trait they decide to use in any other scenes, oh well. As Bruce Wayne/Batman, Ben Affleck is grumpy and unlikeable. At one point he wears this unwieldy battle outfit with inexplicably glowing eyes — it reminded me of the trailer I’d just seen for the much more entertaining-looking Lego Batman Movie. The corpse of Michael Shannon is in this, but doesn’t get much to do. Jeremy Irons is decent as Alfred even if he looks like Hank Azaria.

In a movie that’s entirely too long (2.5 hours that feels like 4), the conflict is wrapped up way too quickly and neatly. And then the movie still takes forever to end. They crassly set up the Justice League movie (well, if Marvel can make all that money with The Avengers….) with Wonder Woman stupidly rocking a Natasha moose-und-skwurl accent. Then they try to insert some emotion but it’s waaaaaay too late. Finally, a plot detail is pointlessly dragged out for a real long time, because if you have any working knowledge of superheroes whatsoever, you can very likely figure out what’s going to happen.